The Role of the Personal Culture in the Management of a Multicultural Team

Preliminary Considerations And Methodology

We chose such a team in order to highlight the personal culture and validate / invalidate the cultural traits partially attributed to different populations in literature. There are many reasons for this choice. Firstly, the extremely high diversity of team composition: basically, every person is from another country (other cultures) of Europe. Secondly, the manager comes from Romania, one of the first countries that Ubisoft has opened branches, characterized by high power distance, but also by a high collectivist spirit. Becomes interesting to see to what extent such a leader can adapt to the individualistic nature of Western colleagues, or can transform them into a stronger team spirit and also what are the personal culture that helps to fulfill the mission (Johnson, 2011). Another reason is represented by the specific way of working: each team member is working at home and communicating with each other only via videoconference. As a result, the cohesion factor represented by the entrepreneurial culture, which is usually formed by direct and daily interaction, where the non-verbal communication plays a more prominent role than verbal sometimes, is practically excluded (Ferraro, 2010). The manager has the task and duty to mitigate “roughness” and achieve team cohesion. He is the only one having direct contact with the company – transmitting the business values and norms of Ubisoft, not only to the employees, but to all the stakeholders (Zeigler, 2008).